SoylentNews

upstart [soylentnews.org] writes:

████ # This file was generated bot-o-matically! Edit at your own risk. ████

upstart [soylentnews.org] writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

bottom line - the "killer laptop story" got nowhere, too much innuendo, not enough sex:

MAGA scrambles to repair the Hunter Biden narrative [politico.com]:

CEO Jack Dorsey is synonymous with Twitter. But when it comes to the policies that could affect the election, Vijaya Gadde is the most important Silicon Valley executive you've never heard of. POLITICO's Nancy Scola reports on the woman behind Twitter's biggest decisions.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts [apple.com] | Subscribe on Google Podcasts [google.com]

It’s not the way Trumpworld would have wanted it. As much disdain as the president’s supporters have for the media, their ultimate goal was to place a story in a well-known, conservative-leaning outlet that conclusively showed Biden profiting off his son’s business deals. Doing so would simultaneously establish the conservative media’s journalistic prowess and bolster MAGA claims of mainstream media bias.

But no A-list conservative outlet has published anything living up to those claims. Instead, these outlets have turned their firepower toward other reliable topics: social media bias; deep state plots; and the media’s failure to cover a story they themselves have backed away from, leaving Giuliani and Bobulinski to sell the story to the fringe.

“I think we're seeing a tactic of something like flooding the zone,” said Chris Loofte, the senior editor of First Draft, a nonprofit that works to combat disinformation. “And it could be backfiring, in that all of these leads are circulating, but none of them are really getting all the attention that would be required for an outlet like The Wall Street Journal to give them any attention.”

A group of Trump allies initially tried to give the story to The Wall Street Journal in the hopes of an exposé, according to The New York Times. But as the Journal reviewed the Hunter Biden documents, Giuliani and Bobulinski started to push every part of the story everywhere — first in the New York Post, then across OAN, Newsmax and whatever outlet would take their content. Then a second trove of emails dropped, given to Schweizer and published on Breitbart.

But with bits and pieces of the entire Hunter Biden narrative floating across the conservative mediasphere, few people on the right have been able to explain who, exactly, did what, on behalf of whom.

Last week, Sebastian Gorka, a former White House official and conservative radio host, asked Bannon on his radio show, [mediamatters.org] when the bombshell was coming.

“Steve, I implore you, we are 15 days out from the election. When is the big shoe drop going to drop?” he asked.

At that point, though, the majority of the Hunter story had, in fact, already dropped.

Even the president himself has had a hard time citing the convoluted storyline, making arcane references during the last debate, randomly bringing up pieces of the story during his rallies, and referring, frequently, to the “laptop from hell” but not explaining what’s actually on the device.

“You know the laptop? You know what it’s called? I said it last night in Wisconsin. It’s called the laptop from hell [politico.com]. Right?” Trump declared Sunday night at a rally in Manchester, N.H. “That laptop. That laptop is not good.”

Angelo Carusone, a longtime monitor of conservative media and president of the progressive group Media Matters for America, said the situation has all the ingredients of a scandal, but that no one can agree on exactly what the scandal is.

Original Submission